Article accepted for publication in the Journal of Contemporary History
Peter Pirker
British Subversive Politics towards Austria and Partisan Resistance in the Austrian-
Slovene Borderland, 1938-1945
Surveying current literature on anti-Nazi resistance within the Third Reich highlights a remarkable omission. The only organised armed resistance within the borders of Nazi
Germany—that conducted by Slovene partisans in what was then the Gau of Carinthia
(Gau Kärnten)—is mentioned only incidentally or ignored altogether. Yet for three years in this southernmost part of the Reich from 1942 to 1945, the Slovene Liberation
Front (Osvobodilna fronta, OF) put up political, civil and military resistance to Nazi rule. At its height in the summer of 1944, approximately 900 armed resistance fighters were organised in two battalions based in the Karawanken mountain range extending to the outskirts of the Gauhauptstadt Klagenfurt. In August 1944, in addition to violent skirmishes with local police and military forces, the partisan forces inflicted in the so- called Battle of Črna na Koroškem (Schwarzenbach) what was presumably the only military defeat inflicted on Wehrmacht and SS units by partisans within the borders of the Third Reich. It is therefore surprising to see that Handbuch zum Widerstand gegen
Nationalsozialismus und Faschismus in Europa 1933/39 bis 1945, the 2011 collection of essays published by Gerd R. Ueberschär, contains scant reference to Carinthian partisan units. And there is absolutely no mention of them in his introductory survey
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Deutsches Reich: Gegner des Nationalsozialismus im ‘Dritten Reich’ 1933-1945.1 This could be excused if more detailed information were presented in the subsequent article about Austria, but there is only a single sentence: ‘Slovene partisan units formed above all in Southern Carinthia, where they worked closely together with Titoist partisans and were the only organisation active on Austrian territory that made a substantial military contribution to that country’s liberation.’2 The article on Slovenia is also a disappointment.3 It seems that the partisan struggle in Gau Kärnten does not fit into the postwar nation-state paradigm of historical research on resistance about National
Socialism.
1 G. Ueberschär, ‘Deutsches Reich: Gegner des Nationalsozialismus im „Dritten Reich“ 1933-1945’, in G. Ueberschär (ed.) Handbuch zum Widerstand gegen Nationalsozialismus und Faschismus in Europa 1933-1945 (Berlin-New York 2011), 3-20. In Austria, interest in the history of the resistance Slovenes put up in Southern Carinthia has increased only in the last 15 years. This was primarily an outgrowth of the publication of a series of memoirs by former partisans—above all, L. Kolenik’s Für das Leben gegen den Tod. Mein Weg in den Widerstand (Klagenfurt/Celovec 2001). Still, the only general study of partisan warfare in Carinthia published by an Austrian historian is J. Rausch, ‘Der Partisanenkampf in Kärnten im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Militärhistorische Schriftenreihe, 39/40 (1979). For biographical information on fallen partisans and reprisals see: B. Entner, Wer war Klara aus Šentlipš/St. Philippen? Kärntner Slowenen und Sloweninnen als Opfer der NS-Verfolgung. Ein Gedenkbuch (Klagenfurt- Wien/Celovec-Dunaj 2014); Lisa Rettl et al. (eds) Peršman (Göttingen 2014). For research in Slovenia mainly based on Yugoslav sources see: M. Linasi, Koroški Partizani. Protonacistični odpor na dvojezičnem Koroškem v okviru slovenske Osvobodilne fronte (Celovec 2010). A German-language version was published in 2013: M. Linasi, Die Kärntner Partisanen. Der antifaschistische Widerstand im zweisprachigen Kärnten unter Berücksichtigung des slowenischen und jugoslawischen Widerstandes (Klagenfurt–Celovec 2013).The appearance of a novel focused greater attention on the struggle by Carinthian Slovene partisans: M. Haderlap, Engel des Vergessens (Göttingen 2011). The novel was subsequently translated into several languages. 2 W. Neugebauer, ‘Österreich: Gegen den Nationalsozialismus 1938-1945’, in Ueberschär, Handbuch, 31–42. In his recent monograph on resistance in Austria, Neugebauer portrays the Carinthian partisans as well as their transnational cooperation in more detail, W. Neugebauer, The Austrian Resistance (Vienna 2014). 3 S. Rutar, ‘Besetztes jugoslawisches Gebiet Slowenien’, in Ueberschär, Handbuch, 269–80.
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The difficulties of integrating the Slovene resistance in Carinthia into a postwar national framework can be seen as an echo of the complicated social and political situation in the
Austrian-Slovene borderland. Many of the guerilla fighters were Carinthian Slovene farmers who had been Austrian citizens prior to the Anschluss in March 1938. After the
Anschluss they were regarded as German citizens and were drafted into the Wehrmacht.
However, many young Slovene soldiers escaped to the mountains and to Slovenia before their conscription or deserted from the Wehrmacht and helped to form the first partisan groups in the Karawanken mountains.4 For local German radicals, the Nazi state had offered new opportunities in Carinthia, and the invasion of Yugoslavia in
April 1941 extended their activities south to Slovenia (Upper Carniola). Thus the partisans were not only battling National Socialism; they were also fighting for the incorporation of ‘Slovene Carinthia’ into a reconstructed Slovene nation state, which would also bring a revolutionary realignment of pre-war society with its structure of unequal land ownership. This at least was the agenda of the political leadership. But for many rank-and-file partisans, many of whom came from a traditional Catholic milieu, this was simply a struggle for survival—theirs and their families’—that could be waged most effectively by joining forces with the OF.5 However, any neglect in historical
4 In the most detailed military historical study conducted to date, Slovenian historian Marjan Linasi asserted that approximately 1000 Carinthians living in the bilingual region were engaged in partisan warfare. Linasi, Kärntner Partisanen, 390. 5 B. Entner, ‘How Feminine is the Resistance? Male and Female Carinthian Slovenes Fighting against the NS-Regime’, in A. Baumgartner et al. (eds) Who resisted? Biographies of Resistance Fighters from entire
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accounts of resistance within Nazi Germany is in stark contrast to the significance attributed by the Allies in 1944 to the resistance these Carinthian partisans were putting up. In that year, Great Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union provided support for the resistance struggle in the Karawanken mountain range and attempted to use it to advance their own individual—and partially conflicting—geopolitical aims in Central
Europe, especially in Austria. In late 1943 on the southeast border of the Third Reich, the British military intelligence agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE), launched its Mission Clowder, one of the largest wartime efforts by a Western intelligence agency to infiltrate Nazi Germany via Austria.6 There ensued similar operations by the
Europe in the Mauthausen Camp and Lectures from the International Conference 2008 (Vienna 2008), 375–83, 378. 6 In contrast to German historiography on anti-Nazi resistance, Anglo-American scholars showed more interest in the resistance put up by Carinthian Slovenes: See, e.g., T. M. Barker, Social Revolutionaries and Secret Agents. The Carinthian Slovene Partisans and Britain’s Special Operations Executive, 1940- 1946 (Boulder 1990); T. M. Barker, ‘Partisan Warfare in the Bilingual Region of Carinthia’, Slovene Studies, 11, 1-2 (1989), 193–210; W. Deakin, ‘Britanci, Jugoslovani in Avstrija’, Zgodovinski časopis, 33, 1 (1979), 102–26. Discussions among British and Yugoslav historians (first and foremost Dušan Biber) evolved from several conferences and round tables between 1975 and 1986. See: D. Biber, ‘Okrogli mizi Jugoslavanskih in Britanskih zgodovinarjev v Londonu 1976 in v Kuparih 1978’, Zgodovinski časopis, 33, 1 (1979), 161–86; D. Biber, ‘Yugoslav and British Policy towards the Carinthian Question, 1941-5’, in R. B. Pynsent (ed.) The Phoney Peace. Power and Culture in Central Europe 1945-49 (London 2000), 100–12 (originally published in Zgodovinski časopis, 33, 1 (1979), 127– 43); W. Deakin et al. (eds), British Policy and Military Strategy in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in 1944 (London 1988); D. Biber, ‘Konec druge svetovne vojne v Jugoslaviji (The End of the Second World War in Yugoslavia). Proceedings of the Fourth Round Table of Yugoslav and British Historians, December 9-11, 1985 Brdo, Slovenia’, Borec, 38, 12 (1986), 625–884; R. Knight, ‘Ethnicity and Identity in the Cold War: The Carinthian Border Dispute, 1945-1946’, International History Review, 22, 2 (2000), 274–303; R. Knight, ‘Life after SOE. Peter Wilkinson’s journey from the Clowder Mission to Waldheim’ Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies, 1 (2009), 71–83; R. Knight, ‘A no-win situation? Gerald Sharp and British policy towards the Carinthian Slovenes’, in B. Entner and A. Malle (eds) Widerstand gegen Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus im Alpen-Adria-Raum/Odpor proti fasizmu in nacizmu v alpsko-jadranskem prostoru (Klagenfurt/Celovec 2010), 84–96.
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USA’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and by the Soviet Union.7 Simultaneous, separate clandestine infiltration operations proceeded over the course of 1944, and, in the winter of 1944-45 before the backdrop of general intra-Allied tensions, culminated in a complete breakdown in cooperation. The utter nadir was the covert assassination of
Clowder’s chief officer in the field, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard, by a partisan commander in December 1944. In 2004, Slovenian historian Marijan Linasi presented for the first time documents from the archive of the Yugoslavian secret service (UDBA) that provide an account of the murder of Hesketh-Prichard.8 In light of additional documents from British and Austrian archives, Linasi’s hypothesis that this was a political murder commissioned by the Communist Party of Slovenia and carried out by a partisan commander seems highly plausible.9 From a British perspective, William Mackenzie’s
7 See F. Lindsay, Beacons in the Night. With the OSS and Tito’s Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia (Stanford, CA 1993); C. Mauch, Schattenkrieg gegen Hitler. Das Dritte Reich im Visier der amerikanischen Geheimdienste 1941 bis 1945 (Stuttgart 1999); B. Torkar, ‘American Intelligence Team Dania and its Activities among Slovenian Partisans during World War II’, Studia Historica Slovenica, 11, 1 (2011), 137–46; S. Beer, ‘ÖsterreicherInnen in den westlichen Armeen und Geheimdiensten’, in S. Karner and K. Duffek (eds.) Widerstand in Österreich 1938-1945. Die Beiträge der Parlaments-Enquete 2005 (Vienna 2005), 213–226; S. Beer, ‘Alliierte Planung, Propaganda und Penetration 1943–1945. Die künftigen Besatzungsmächte und das wiederzuerrichtende Österreich, von der Moskauer Deklaration bis zur Befreiung’, in S. Karner (ed.) Das Burgenland im Jahr 1945. Beiträge zur Landes- und Sonderausstellung 1985 (Eisenstadt 1985), 67–88; G. Bajc, Operacija Julijska Krajina (Koper 2006). 8 M. Linasi, ‘Še o zavezniških misijah ali kako in zakaj je moral umreti britanski major Cahusac’, Zgodovinski Časopis, 1-2 (2004), 99–126, 106. 9 Accordingly, there will be no further discussion here either of this hypothesis or of the question how Hesketh-Prichard’s disappearance was addressed and interpreted by analysts, historians, partisans and authors in postwar Great Britain, Austria and Slovenia. See P. Pirker, Subversion deutscher Herrschaft. Der britische Geheimdienst SOE und Österreich (Göttingen 2012), 368–70; for a comparison of Austrian, British and Slovene postwar narratives on partisan resistance, the Clowder Mission and the fate of Hesketh-Prichard see P. Pirker, ‘Partisanen und Agenten: Mythen um die SOE-Mission Clowder’, Zeitgeschichte, 38, 1 (2011), 21–38, 28; for a general account of politics of the past and memory culture
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assessment of the Clowder Mission, in his official history of the SOE, was clear—he called it one of the SOE’s most ambitious projects in Europe, a ‘brilliant display of gallantry, entirely without practical result’.10
This essay will analyse and reconsider the Clowder Mission and the partisan struggle in
Carinthia in the context of the SOE’s policy towards Austria and the interallied proclamation on the reestablishment of Austria in November 1943, commonly known as
‘Moscow declaration on Austria’. In scholarship on Western Allied policymaking towards Austria during WWII, the dominant hypothesis is that of Canadian historian
Robert Keyserlingk, whereby the above-mentioned Moscow Declaration on Austria by no means expressed a political program; rather, it is said to have been merely a propaganda declaration as part of waging psychological warfare.11 On the basis of a rigorous study of the files both of the SOE and the Foreign Office, I want to present a
in connection with Austrian SOE agents see: P. Pirker, ‘SOE agents in Austria. Persecution, Post-War Integration and Memory, Zgodovinski časopis, 67, 1-2 (2013), 202–27. 10 W. Mackenzie, The Secret History of S.O.E. Special Operations Executive 1940-1945 (London 2000), 697. 11 R. Keyserlingk, Austria in World War II. An Anglo-American Dilemma (Quebec 1988), 207–8; R. Keyserlingk, ‘1. November 1943: Die Moskauer Deklaration – Die Allierten, Österreich und der Zweite Weltkrieg’, in R. Steininger and M. Gehler (eds) Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert. Vom Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart, Band 2, (Wien 1997), 9–39, 18. Keyserlingk’s hypothesis was strongly supported by Günther Bischof: G. Bischof, ‘Die Instrumentalisierung der Moskauer Erklärung nach dem 2. Weltkrieg’, Zeitgeschichte, 20 (1993), 345–66, 350. For a critical view of this issue, see: G. Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit (Wien 1998), 24–7. Nevertheless, Keyserlingk’s interpretation subsequently became the generally accepted opinion. See T. Albrich, ‘Holocaust und Schuldabwehr. Vom Judenmord zum kollektiven Opferstatus’, in R. Steininger and M. Gehler (eds), Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert. Vom Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart, Band 2, (Wien 1997), 39–106, 57; similarly in a recently published work: C. Lehnguth, Waldheim und die Folgen (Frankfurt/Main 2013), 59.
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revision of this hypothesis12 and follow up how the declaration affected subversive allied warfare against Germany in the Austrian-Slovene borderland. My essay will pursue a transnational perspective focusing on the following questions: What policy did the SOE pursue towards Austria in contrast to Germany and on which assumptions was it based? What significance did the Moscow Declaration assume in Allied political planning? What consequences did it have for the actual subversive warfare the Allies waged on the Third Reich’s southeastern border? What was the SOE’s agenda in seeking to cooperate with Carinthian partisan units? What did this cooperation yield for the partisan struggle? What were the grounds for the flare-up of the conflict with the
Carinthian partisans, and what consequences did this have for the postwar political configuration in this ethnically conflict-ridden region? Taking this approach will make it possible over the course of this paper to also deal with unanswered questions about the SOE’s engagement with Austria that Gerald Steinacher formulated in an initial analysis of SOE documents having to do with Austria—for instance, why the SOE miscalculated the importance of territorial and ethnic conflicts in Central Europe.13
Aside from Steinacher’s article, the detailed and comprehensive analyses produced
12 For recent discussions see: Pirker, Subversion, 213–21; S. Beer, ‘SOE, PWE und schließlich FO. Die Briten als Vorreiter der alliierten Österreichplanung, 1940-1943’ in St. Karner and A. O. Tschubarjan (eds.) Die Moskauer Deklaration 1943. ‚Österreich wieder herstellen’ (Vienna 2015), 99–108; G. Bischof, ‘Die Moskauer Deklaration und die österreichische Geschichtspolitik’ in Karner and Tschubarian, Die Moskauer Deklaration, 249–59. 13 G. Steinacher, ‘The Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Austria, 1940-1945’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 15, 2 (2002), 211–21, 218.
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heretofore were either written by historical protagonists themselves,14 or were hardly based on those SOE documents that have only been made available in the last 15 years.
Shortly after its formation in summer 1940, the SOE founded, among other country sections, one which focused its activities on Germany and Austria. Despite the fact that the British government had recognized the Anschluss in 1938, the SOE continued to consider Germany and Austria as separate entities. In the organisation’s internal strategy discussions about subversive warfare against Germany, the first head of the
SOE, Labour Minister Hugh Dalton, concurred with the assessment of Sir Robert
Vansittart, who was convinced that no resistance against the Nazi regime would materialize in Germany.15 Thus, the SOE’s activities in Germany did not concentrate on attempts to establish contact with opponents of National Socialism and potential resistance fighters, but rather on sabotaging German morale, infrastructure and administration such as the distribution in Germany of counterfeit rationing cards for food and clothing. Plans to kill Hitler were worked out in detail in autumn 1944 but ultimately scrapped.16
14 P. Wilkinson, Foreign Fields. The Story of an SOE Operative (London 2002); Lindsay, Beacons; B. Gorjan, Zavezniške misije na Koroškem in Štajerskem 1944–1945: operacija Avstrija (Koper 2003); P. Howarth, Undercover. The Men and Women of the Special Operations Executive (London 1980). 15 TNA, HS 8/206, Hugh Dalton to Robert Vansittart, 1. January 1941. 16 See: TNA, HS 7/145, SOE History. German and Austrian Section. Part I. 1 (a) and 2 (a) by Lt. Col. R. H. Thornley; M. Seaman, Operation Foxley. The British Plan to Kill Hitler (London 1998). On the discussion of the SOE’s policy towards Germany, see: K.-J. Müller and D. N. Dilks (eds), Großbritannien und der deutsche Widerstand (Paderborn 1994); L. Eiber, ‘Verschwiegene
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SOE took a different approach to Austria and the Austrians. Three of the Austrian experts within the SOE, Evelyn Stamper, Clara Holmes and Elizabeth Hodgson, had worked for many years as officers at the British Legation in Vienna (partly for the SIS) and developed a very positive attitude towards Austria that can be called ‘Austrophilia’.
Even though the intelligence-gathering activities at the British Embassy in Vienna focused on obtaining military information about Germany and Italy,17 SIS staffers nevertheless also monitored domestic political developments in Austria following the establishment of an Austro-fascist dictatorship in 1933-34 and the outlawing of the country’s Social Democratic party (SDAP). Like other British observers such as G. E.
R. Gedye, the Vienna correspondent of the New York Times, the SOE’s Austria experts considered the SDAP—despite years of political repression and the wave of arrests following the Anschluss—as a party that was still capable of resistance and ready to unite with bourgeois and Catholic opponents of the Nazis to form a national front against what they termed Prussian dominion in Austria.18 The British observers derived their assumption of a readiness to fight from the fact that at least some members of the
Social Democrats in Vienna, Styria and Upper Austria had put up armed resistance in
Bündnispartner. Die Union deutscher sozialistischer Organisationen in Großbritannien und die britischen Nachrichtendienste’, Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, (1997), 66–87. 17 K. Benton, ‘The ISOS years: Madrid 1941-43’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30, 3 (1995), 359– 410, 360-66; on the arrest of the SIS station chief in Vienna, Thomas Kendrick, and the escape of his staff, see: P. Pirker, Gegen das ‚Dritte Reich’. Sabotage und transnationaler Widerstand in Österreich und Slowenien 1938-1940 (Klagenfurt 2010), 28–33. 18 TNA, HS 6/3, Austria, 21 January 1941.
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February 1934 against repression by the Dollfuß Regime. Gedye, who in 1941 likewise joined SOE, painted a thoroughly optimistic picture of Austrians’ power to resist.19
Adding credibility to Stamper, Holmes, Hodgson and Gedye’s positions was the fact that they had been eyewitnesses to the Anschluss. Stamper and Holmes explained the absence of resistance in March 1938 as having been attributable to the extraordinary efficiency of Germany’s military course of action, which was said to have completely surprised the Austrians.20
On this basis, SOE officers formulated plans for Austria which fundamentally differed from those for Germany. At the top of the agenda as far as Austria was concerned was to instigate separatist resistance there via propagandistic, political and military action that would hasten the Third Reich’s disintegration.21 This approach can be understood as a means of exploiting opposition to National Socialist suppression of national identities in order to combat Nazi supremacy in Central Europe. The SOE’s goal was to
‘bring about the restoration of Austria as a national unit’22, and to do so by supporting anti-Nazi resistance and anti-German resistance among exiles and in Austria. For the
SOE, the primary function of the re-establishment of an independent Austria was to
19 G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions. The Central European Tragedy (London 1939), 362. 20 TNA, HS 6/3, Austria, 21.1.1941. Stamper noted: ‘In spite of any statement to the contrary, we were witnesses of the extreme efficiency of the German method in Austria. There was no possibility of resistance – consequently, there was no bloodshed, and the Anschluss was a fait accompli within a matter of hours.’ 21 TNA, HS 6/3, Austria, 21 January 1941. 22 Ibid.
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thwart future German hegemony in Central and Southeastern Europe. Stamper expressed this position to bourgeois-democratic Austrian exile politician Emil Müller-
Sturmheim in late May 1942 in no uncertain terms:
When German domination in Europe has been broken, Austria – geographically,
economically and politically – holds a key position in Central Europe. Austria must
not belong to Germany. […] It matters little whether Austria forms part of a Nat.Soc.
Germany, a Communist Germany, or a Germany run on Democratic lines: the
possession of Austria – the gateway to the East – will ensure German hegemony in
Europe.23
A central element of the SOE’s early policymaking towards Austria was to promulgate a nationalist, anti-German line among Austrian political exiles in order to propagate
Austrian nationhood. The SOE cooperated with and financed only those groups that pursued an anti-German line.24 The Socialists, whom the SOE expected to furnish the closest links to resistance groups in Austria, held out the longest against this position. It was only in the wake of a protracted conflict between 1940 and 1942 that the London
Bureau of the Austrian Socialists in Great Britain finally abandoned its pan-German and pan-European approach to overcoming National Socialism and cooperated with the
23 TNA, HS 6/2, X/A to Emil Mueller-Sturmheim, 30 May 1942. 24 TNA, HS 6/692, Notes for S.O.2 Executive Committee, X Section, 12 December 1940. Generally excluded from financing were Communist-led groups; more on this subject later.
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SOE.25 Furthermore, Stamper and Holmes edited Free Austria, the highest circulation exile newspaper, the mission of which was to present an image to the Anglo-American public that set Austria apart politically, culturally and historically from Germany.26
They conducted a vehement campaign against exiles and others within the British propaganda machinery who were proponents of a Pan-German orientation—for example, leftist Labour politician Richard Crossman.27 Even though rapid eastward and southeastward expansion of Nazi dominion made open resistance in Austria unrealistic over the near term, the SOE remained true to the fundamental orientation of its separatist policy in favour of the formation of Austrian nationhood. From early
November 1941 onwards, SOE pressed the Foreign Office to change its policy on
Austria and publish a declaration in favour of an independent Austrian state.28 And what is absolutely striking is the similarity of the X Section’s position on Austria to that of
Stalin. Only a few weeks later, Stalin declared for the first time his position that Austria was to be separated from Germany and exist as an independent state,29 and he reiterated this position in negotiations with Foreign Minister Eden on 16 December 1941 on
25 TNA, HS 6/3, From A/D1 to A/DX, 7 April 1942; TNA HS 6/692, X to D/CD (O), 13 October 1942. 26 TNA, HS 6/2, XF/A/20, Minutes of 8 Janurary 1941. 27 TNA, HS 6/3, Comments on Propaganda to Austria, 28 January 1941. 28 For an early example see: TNA, HS 6/3, From X to AD/W, 31 October 1941; TNA, HS 6/3, From AD/W to C.E.O., 1 November 1941. 29 J. Laufer, ‘Die sowjetischen Nachkriegsplanungen’, in Karner and Tschubarjan, Die Moskauer Deklaration, 71–7, 73.
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future spheres of influence in Europe.30 In these talks, Eden did indeed agree with
Stalin on Austria’s independence,31 but, in fact, the British Foreign Office had not yet established a firm position on the matter. Rather, it was made clear to the SOE ‘that an independent Austria is not at present an official war aim of H.M.G’.32 The question of
Austria’s future was not initially a high priority item on either the British or the Soviet foreign policy agenda. British-Soviet talks focused on the precise location of the Soviet
Union’s western border.33 Unlike the Soviet leadership, the British Foreign Office earlier in 1941 had commissioned studies on the subject of Austria’s future, which recommended a wide variety of solutions. One study prepared by the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) in September 1941 came to the conclusion that only the inclusion of Austria in a Danube confederation would serve Austrians’ interests,34 whereas the Royal Institute for International Affairs considered a break-up of Austria as probably the best solution from economic, political and practical standpoints.35 Neither of the two expert appraisals favoured reestablishing Austria as an independent state.
30 TNA, FO 371/30910, C1282/46/18, Commitments as regards the future of Austria, 8 February 1942. See A. Filitov, ‘Sowjetische Planungen zur Wiederrichtung Österreichs 1941-1945’, in S. Karner and B. Stelzl-Marx (eds) Die Rote Armee in Österreich. Sowjetische Besatzung 1945-1955 (Graz 2005), 27–38, 28; 31 L. Kettenacker, Krieg zur Friedenssicherung (Göttingen 1983), 119; A. Filitov, ‘Österreich in den sowjetischen strategischen Planungen (1941-1945)’, in Karner and Tschubarjan, Die Moskauer Deklaration, 92–97, 92. 32 TNA, HS 6/3, From A/D to A/DW, 21 November 1941. 33 W. I. Iber and P. Ruggenthaler, ‘Zur Bedeutung der Moskauer Deklaration zu Österreich für die Sowjetunion’, in Karner and Tschubarjan, Die Moskauer Deklaration, 78–91, 80. 34 TNA, FO 371/26538, C9503/280/18, Austria, n. d. [September 1941]. See Keyserlingk, Austria in World War II, 100. 35 TNA, FO 371/26538, C11629/280/18, The Austrian question, 14 September 1941.
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Moreover, Churchill was a fervant proponent of a Danube federation. In light of the failure of the nation state system in the aftermath of World War I, the Foreign Office generally favoured federative solutions conducive to a balance of power and larger economic entities in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and thus, for the time being, rejected an early political commitment to the reestablishment of Austria.36
Nevertheless, one outcome of a conference of Allied foreign ministers in November
1943 in Moscow was a joint declaration that proclaimed the reestablishment of Austria as an Allied war aim. As Great Britain was the driving force behind this policy, an analysis of British policymaking is essential to understand the genesis of the Moscow
Declaration.37 In it, first of all, the Allies called Austria the first victim of ‘Hitlerite aggression’ which was to be liberated from ‘German domination’, secondly, they promised to re-establish a ‘free and independent Austria’ finally, they reminded Austria
‘that she has a responsibility which she cannot evade for the participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany, and that in the final settlement account will inevitably be taken of her own contribution to her liberation’.38 According to Keyserlingk, the British draft of the Moscow Declaration was quickly drawn up on the basis of a work of
36 TNA, FO 371/30910, C1282/46/18, Minute of Roger Makins, 27 January 1942. 37 There is general agreement among scholars that Great Britain spearheaded the initiative to issue an allied declaration on Austria and that the Soviet Union, until the conference, abstained from intervention. See Beer, SOE, PWE und schließlich FO, 101; Iber and Ruggenthaler, Zur Bedeutung der Moskauer Deklaration zu Österreich für die Sowjetunion, 82. 38 Cited in Keyserlingk, Austria in World War II,, 207-8.
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propaganda proposed by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) in January 1943.39 But
Keyserlingk’s assertion that the British political warfare organisations ‘concurred that political warfare activity ought to focus on Austria’ cannot stand up to scrutiny on the basis of material in the SOE and PWE files.40 The Moscow Declaration was not only a short-term instrument of psychological warfare designed to encourage resistance in
Austria; it also expressed on the level of propaganda a well-thought-out paradigm shift in British policymaking towards that country, which by no means had begun in 1943 but rather the previous year. It was prompted by a speech Churchill delivered in
February 1942 to a gathering at the Austria Office, an SOE-sponsored Austrian exile organisation, in which Churchill referred to Austria as the ‘first victim of Nazi aggression’ and promised that ‘the people of Britian will never desert the cause of freedom of Austria from the Prussian yoke’.41 Churchill’s surprising formulations triggered in the Foreign Office a controversy as to their meaning and implications. The conclusion was that Churchill’s speech had meant neither derecognition of the
Anschluss nor commitment to an independent Austria.42 At the same time, it was
39 Ibid, 135, 144, 166. 40 At that point in time, the focus of their work was on preparing for the invasion of the European mainland, which was planned for the summer of 1943. Nor is there any indication in the transcripts of the meetings attended by the SOE top-echelon staff in winter 1942-43 that Austria had high priority. TNA, HS 8/204, Minutes of C.D.’s Weekly Meeting, 6 January 1943. See Wilkinson, Foreign Fields, 128. 41 TNA, FO 371/30943, C7576/1364/18, Speech held by Mr. Churchill on 18th February 1942. See Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit, 13. 42 TNA, FO 898/216, Foreign Office Directive for Austrian Broadcasts, 20 February 1942.
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decided that the future of Austria as a state would be investigated in depth by the FRPS on the basis of three new studies.43
Until 1943, leading officials in the Foreign Office regarded the Austrian Question as a dependent variable of the future political configuration of Central Europe. In early
March 1943, the Central Department of the Foreign Office decided to come out in favour of the reestablishment of an independent Austrian nation-state, which the SOE had been calling for since 1941. Geoffrey Harrison, the Austria expert in the Central
Department of the Foreign Office, provided a sober, pragmatic summary of the results of a year long process of discussions and considerations among British diplomats in
Whitehall since February 1942: ‘[…] we shall have to start anyhow with a free and independent Austria’.44
Taking a different tack than that of Keyserlingk, who arbitrarily separated consideration of political planning and psychological warfare, we can analyse the paradigm shift from an integrated perspective on three levels (1) the FRPS studies and their assessment by
Foreign office diplomats, (2) psychological and political warfare, and (3) inter-Allied policymaking. (1) The most important shift following the FRPS studies,45 which
Keyserlingk omitted from consideration in his study, was that Austria’s economic
43 TNA, FO371/30942, C2400/154/18, Minute by Geoffrey Harrison, 21 February 1942. 44 TNA, FO371/34464, C2311/321/18, Minutes of Geoffrey Harrison, 6 March 1943. 45 The studies were entitled ‘Economic Viability of Autonomous Austria’ (6 August 1942), ‘Structure and Productivity of the Austrian and Swiss Economies’ (20 November 1942) and ‘The Future of Austria. Confederations in Eastern Europe’ (26 February 1943), see TNA, FO 371/30943.
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viability was no longer regarded as the central problem; rather, it was the political- ideological task of engendering an Austrian national consciousness among a population the overwhelming majority of which considered itself German. ‘[…] we should have to make it a conscious aim to prove to Austrians that Austrian self-interest and Austrian patriotism (or separatism) were coincident,’46 Harrison argued. It is obvious that he aimed to kindle an anti-German, Austrian national spirit, not only for ‘helping to win the war’ but as a ‘contribution towards winning the peace’.47 Harrison was very well aware of the fact that neither political exiles nor resisters in Austria had shown noteworthy capacities of nation building abroad or in the underground.48 Since, until
1943, the SOE could hardly introduce evidence proving the existence of patriotic anti-
German resistance in Austria, but, in light of the worsening war situation, could establish an increase in anti-German resentment, a declaration by the Allies in favour of a free and independent Austria was then meant to give the Nazis’ opponents in Austria as well as the mutually hostile Austrian exile groups long-term political prospects independent of Germany’s. The perspective of substitute nation building was also
46 TNA, FO 371/30943, C11735/1364/18, Minutes of Geoffrey Harrison, 1 December 1942. 47 TNA, FO371/34464, C2311/321/18, Minutes of Geoffrey Harrison, 6 March 1943. 48 This can be contrasted to the situation in Slovenia, which was occupied by Nazi Germany and Italy; here the OF was already conducting resistance operations, and carrying on state building and nation building underground. Tone Ferenc and Bojan Godeša, ‘Die Slowenen unter der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft 1941–1945’, in: D. Nečak et al. (eds) Slovensko-avstrijski odnosi v 20. stoletju/Slowenisch- österreichische Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Ljubljana 2004), 219–68, 260-1.; B. Repe, ‘The Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation’, in J. Pirjevec and B. Repe (eds) Resistance, Suffering, Hope. The Slovene Partisan Movement 1941-1945 (Ljubljana 2008), 36–47, 43-4.
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manifested by the frequent use of biological metaphors in the Foreign Office’s elaborations on Austria. For example, one of the key position papers called for carefully nurturing the still-delicate seedling of Austrian patriotism.49
(2) The issue in question then became what means would be most effective to nurture an
Austrian desire for independence and sustainably maintain it. Whether abruptly commencing to foment resistance would be an appropriate instrument to sow the seeds of an enduring national identity in contradistinction to that of the Germans was a matter of dispute in the discussions among British strategists. On one hand, SOE and PWE agreed in August 1942 that the propaganda directed at Austrians ought to accentuate the direct linkage between the resistance they put up and their country’s political and economic future.50 The corresponding directive contains—for the first time and prominently featured—a responsibility clause like that which would later appear in
Harrison’s draft for the Allied declaration.51 The experts in the Foreign Office took a more sober view of the Austrians, considering them coolly, from a more distanced perspective and on the basis of current reports instead of past personal impressions and wishful thinking. Subjects of discussion in the Foreign Office included the lack of evidence of anti-German resistance as well as the high morale of Austrian soldiers
49 TNA, FO 371/34465, C6162/321/18, Austria. Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, War Cabinet, 25 May 1943. 50 TNA, FO 898/548, Propaganda Policy towards Austria, 2 August 1942. 51 The clause states: ‘In determining the future treatment of Austria, it will be necessary to take into account the conduct of the Austrians during the war and the indications they may give of their own desires for the future. On both these points they have a responsibility which they cannot evade.’ Ibid.
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serving in the German Wehrmacht. The War Office was unable to detect any particular inclination to desert at this point. To the diplomats in the Foreign Office, it seemed highly dubious that there would ever be organised resistance in Austria.52 In light of these facts and circumstances on the ground, it was deemed doubtful that a straightforward call for revolt and making the country’s postwar treatment strongly conditional on the resistance Austrians put up would be an expedient measure.
Accordingly, Harrison not only toned down this conditional formulation; he also relegated it to last place in the text structure. In contrast to previous propaganda directives and proposals by the SOE and PWE, Harrison completely rearranged the draft for the Allied declaration. In the very first sentence, he termed Austria ‘a victim to Nazi aggression’.53 The key lever to get Austrians to distance themselves from Germany was for the planned declaration to prompt Austrians to consider themselves first of all as victims of Nazi Germany. Harrison’s rationale for his draft is contained in the discussion of his proposal to the War Cabinet to submit to the USA and the Soviet
Union a joint declaration on the reestablishment of Austria. In his opinion, nationalism transcending party lines flared up at least to some extent in Austria immediately prior to the Anschluss in opposition to Nazi Germany’s aggression.54 Harrison saw this as the
52 See the discussion going on at the Foreign Office’s Central Department in March 1943: FO 371/34464, C 2790/321/18. 53 TNA, FO 371/34465, C7012/321/18, Proposed Joint United States, Soviet and British statement on the future of Austria, 16 August 1943. 54 TNA FO 371/34464, C3729/321/18, The Future of Austria, Draft, 4 April 1943.
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sole historical point of reference that addressed Austrians as a nation and, indeed, as the victim of German aggression. He omitted any effort to differentiate between Austria and
Germany on the basis of ethnic or cultural factors. Thus, he had recourse to Churchill’s succinct formulation that had kicked off the debate. For Harrison, the chief aim of the
Allied declaration was to accustom Austrians to an independent political future.55 In other words, the declaration Harrison suggested was conceived primarily as an offer for
Austria to escape shared blame and responsibility with Germany. Harrison’s intention here was to send signals to potential political leaders in Austria and to focus their attention on forming a government: ‘Once the Austrians realize that they have a future as an independent State, it is to be hoped that leaders from amongst the Austrian people will be forthcoming’.56 The subversive nature of Harrison’s formulation is obvious.
This was not a matter of conventional political recognition of an already extant separatist nationalism; quite the contrary. Separatist nationalism was to be externally stimulated and offered long-term assurances—a classic example of subversive policymaking in opposition to an empire. Giving impetus to real resistance on the ground, as expressed in the shared responsibility hypothesis, was clearly accorded subsidiary importance.
55 TNA FO 371/34464, C4907/321/18, Minutes of Geoffrey Harrison, 15 April 1943. 56 Ibid.
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(3) At the foreign ministers conference in Moscow, one of the changes the Soviet Union wanted to be made to the British draft of a joint Allied declaration was the deletion of a passage that held out to an independent Austria the prospect of association with its neighboring states.57 It is interesting to note that the Austria experts in the Foreign
Office, in the calculations that went into their policy towards Austria, had already anticipated the Soviet veto of such federation plans. As early as August 1942, Harrison already viewed the chances of implementing such a federation with skepticism;58 sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall, the author of the study ‘The Future of
Austria’, was even more skeptical. Thus, in early March 1943, once the question of
Austria’s so-called viability was cleared up, a second conception of British postwar planning was abandoned—namely, the primacy of confederation as opposed to restoration of a nation-state. Now, to even the strongest proponents of federal structures, the reestablishment of Austria seemed the more pragmatically sensible way to proceed.59 This fundamental change of perspective on the part of British planners, who thereby basically adopted the early conception held by the SOE, has been overlooked heretofore. Taking this into account makes it understandable why Harrison put so much emphasis on fostering an Austrian national consciousness. There was no sentimentality for Austria connected with this; rather, it stemmed from political rationality prevailing
57 Iber and Ruggenthaler, Zur Bedeutung der Moskauer Deklaration, 82. 58 TNA FO 371/30943, C799/1374/18, Minute of Geoffrey Harrison, 20 August 1942. 59 TNA FO 371/34464, C2311/321/18, Minute of D. Allen, 3 March 1943.
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in the Foreign Office. A second major change made to the British draft was the revision of the responsibility clause. It was put in stronger terms at the behest of the Soviet negotiators in Moscow and explicitly related to Austria’s participation in the war ‘on the side of Hitlerite Germany’, though not to enhace the propagandistic value of the declaration as a means of inciting resistance but rather to stake the Soviet Union’s claim to reparations payments.60 The basic British conception—that the reestablishment of an independent Austria was not made conditional on the resistance Austrians put up—was not changed. Nevertheless, the policy of Great Britain as well as the USA was still to exempt Austria from reparation payments, a policy that aimed to foster Austrians’ identification with a future independent nation-state.61 This approach was accepted by the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.62
The Moscow Declaration was not a document that delineated an exact state-building project. It was conceived as a political declaration with which the Allies asserted the reestablishment of an independent state as the guiding principle of their agenda and offered the Austrians the role of victim as the foundation of their process of nation- building in contradistinction to Germany. All other formulations remained vague and matters of interpretation. The Allies had indeed thereby come to an agreement on
60 Iber and Ruggenthaler, Zur Bedeutung der Moskauer Deklaration, 86; Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit, 22. 61 See Günter Bischof, ‘Die Planung und Politik der Alliierten’, in R. Steininger and M. Gehler (eds) Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert. Vom Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart (Innsbruck 1997), Vol. 2, 107– 46, 109. 62 Iber and Ruggenthaler, Zur Bedeutung der Moskauer Deklaration, 87.
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nation-state formation as an element of political warfare waged against Germany; however, what position Austria would assume in the geopolitical fabric and the configuration of that country’s domestic political sphere remained open. These questions became virulent in 1944 in the context of the unilateral and covertly subversive policymaking of the great powers. That applies particularly to the Clowder
Mission and its communist competitor initiatives being carried out on the southern border of the Third Reich, i.e. in Slovenian-Austrian borderlands. Before I analyse, in light of these background factors, the anatomy of this inter-Allied rivalry amidst the resistance struggle against Nazi Germany, it is necessary to briefly go into another key aspect of the SOE’s political agenda with regard to Austria.
In addition to separatism from Germany, policymaking by the SOE’s Austrian Section was characterized by another form of ideological and geopolitical disassociation: to prevent Austria from falling into a Communist and/or Soviet sphere of influence in
Central Europe. This item was well hidden on its agenda, particularly from 1942 onwards, but the anti-communist character of SOE policymaking towards Austria is evident from a consideration of the organisation’s relations with Austrian exiles in
Great Britain.63 The SOE maintained no direct contacts with the Communists who, it
63 It must be emphasized that the SOE did not reject any and all forms of collaboration with Communists from and in continental Europe. In addition to long-term cooperative efforts with Communist-led partisans in Greece and Yugoslavia, Denmark can be cited as another example to the contrary. K. J. V. Jespersen, No Small Achievement. Special Operations Executive and the Danish Resistance 1940–1945 (Odense 2002), 299–301.
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must be noted, were the most fervent advocates of Austrian nationalism.64 After having converted the Socialists from their traditional pan-German to an Austrian national line, the SOE recruited a number of Austrian Socialists as staff members and agents in order to then use them to infiltrate Austria and thereby assist the Socialist Party in reestablishing itself as a strong democratic leftist alternative to the Communist Party of
Austria (KPÖ) that, it was feared, would play a major role in Austrian postwar politics.65 Preparations for the reorganization of socialist and democratic parties in
Austria were most certainly among the tasks assigned to SOE’s Austrian Section.66
With respect to the makeup of Austria’s post-Nazi government, it envisioned a coalition of Catholics and Social Democrats.67 Thus, the SOE basically adopted a position that was already being advocated in the early 1930s by the British community in Vienna, which had yielded several of the SOE’s current staff members. G. E. R. Gedye, for example, had written several articles in 1934 in which he appealed to the Western powers to apply intense pressure on Chancellor Dollfuß, the head of Austria’s authoritarian government, to reinstate democracy and allow for a governing coalition
64 The only exemption was an 1942 SOE airborne operation pursuant to an agreement with the NKVD, by means of which a few Communists who had been exiled in Moscow parachuted into Austria. See Barry McLoughlin, ‘Proletarian Cadres en route. Austrian NKVD Agents in Britain 1941-43’, Labour History Review 62, 3 (1997), 296–317; H. Schafranek, ‘Die Anfänge der Operation Pickaxe 1941/42. Sowjetische Funk- und Fallschirmagenten unter der Patronanz des britischen Geheimdienstes SOE’, Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies 2, 1 (2008), 7–22. 65 See Pirker, Subversion, 117. 66 TNA, HS 8/272, The Prospects of Subversion. Summary, 21 April 1941. 67 TNA, HS 6/3, From C.D. to Mr. Jebb, 23 January 1941; TNA, FO 898/214, Propaganda to Austrians.
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with the Socialists that would be in a position to withstand pressure from Nazi
Germany.68 This concept of a strong national alliance of Catholics and Socialists to counter a threat both foreign and domestic was transposed by the SOE onto the potential postwar conflict with the Soviet Union and the KPÖ over Austria’s political future. The rivalry between Socialists and Communists characterized not only the political activities of Austrian exiles in Great Britain but also the SOE’s missions to Austria. Whereas routes via Switzerland, Italy and Turkey were planned for Socialists or their agents were brought in directly via parachute jump, the SOE’s efforts to establish initial contacts in
Austria via partisans in Slovenia entailed deployment of mostly British officers and some politically unaffiliated Jewish exiles from Austria. The exile Socialists’ leading functionaries such as Oscar Pollak as well as planners on the SOE’s staff proceeded under the assumption that the Communist leadership of the Slovenian partisans would not permit the infiltration into Austria of Socialists who were independent of them.69
The anticommunist agenda of SOE’s policy towards Austria corresponded to the original outline of the Clowder Mission too. In order to gain an adequate understanding of the Clowder Mission, we must briefly elaborate on its basic strategic perspective and tactical aims. The basic idea arose from considerations on future SOE operations in
Central and Eastern Europe by SOE officer Peter Wilkinson. He had dealt primarily
68 G. E. R. Gedye, ‘Austria’s dark outlook’, The Fortnightly 136 (1934), 257–72, 272. 69 TNA, HS 9/1612 PF Stephan Wirland[n]er, From X to D/H98, 17 July 1944.
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with Poland and Czechoslovakia thus far during his intelligence career and was no expert on Austria or Germany.70 His closest staff associate was SOE officer Alfgar
Hesketh-Prichard, who had been in charge of the SOE Czech Operations until
September 1943.71 In July 1943, the SOE’s Yugoslavia department in Cairo informed
Wilkinson that the OF had also begun to recruit members and organise anti-German resistance within the borders of the Third Reich in Carinthia, Upper Carniola and Lower
Styria. Wilkinson saw this cross-border subversion by the OF as a potential bridge for
British operations in Central Europe.72
The Clowder Mission was not initially part of SOE plans for Austria. When, in
September 1943, Wilkinson drew up the first plan for the Clowder Mission, the list of objectives he formulated included the following: ‘to establish direct contact with resistance elements in Central and Eastern Europe’ and ‘to establish a War Station in
Central Europe for coordinating resistance elements and for exploiting any general rising in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia in accordance with future strategic requirements’.73 ‘Future strategic requirements’ was Wilkinson’s allusion to the
70 In November 1941 Wilkinson was appointed supervisor of the German and Austrian sections as well as the Polish and Czech SOE sections. He was responsible for the preparation of the Czech agents who conducted Operation Anthropoid, the code name for the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. In 1945 Wilkinson was appointed as head of the Political Branch of the Austrian Allied Commission. In 1947 he joined the Foreign Office. His last diplomatic appointment was Ambassador to Austria in 1970-71. 71 TNA, HS 9/1211/7 PF Major A.C.G. Hesketh-Prichard, S.O.E. Record of Service. 72 Wilkinson, Foreign Fields, 135. 73 TNA, HS 6/13, Project – Clowder, 4 September 1943.
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looming conflict with the Soviet Union over its border with Poland, and between the
Soviet Union and the Polish Underground Army.74 Right from the outset, Wilkinson positioned the Clowder Mission as an effort both to organise anti-Nazi resistance as well as to prepare for a coming confrontation with the Soviet Union over future influence in Central Europe. It was not until 29 November 1943 that SOE Director
Colin Gubbins issued a directive that launched intensified efforts to establish contacts with regime opponents in Germany and Austria.75 What motivated this new directive were no doubt, on one hand, the Allied agreement on the Polish-Soviet border that had been reached at the Teheran Conference at that time, and, on the other hand, conversations among Gubbins, the British military staff and Churchill on future strategy governing warfare in Central Europe. In Teheran, Churchill had sought Stalin’s support for a landing in Istria by Western Allied forces that were then bogged down south of
Rome, the aim of which would have been to move northward through the ‘so-called
Ljubljana gap’ and reach Vienna by the summer of 1944.76 By reflecting this strategy, the new Clowder guidelines likewise called for setting up a war station, this time in
74 Wilkinson, Foreign Fields, 126. 75 TNA, HS 6/13, Directive for Clowder, 29 November 1943. 76 On the Ljubljana gap strategy, see T. M. Barker, ‘The Ljubljana Gap Strategy: alternative to Anvil/Dragoon or Fantasy?’, The Journal of Military History, 1 (1992), 57–86; G. Bischof, ‘Between Responsibility and Rehabilitation: Austria in International Politics 1940-1950’, PhD thesis, Harvard University, (1989), 64.
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Slovenia. Wilkinson named this project Clowder Mayor.77 The reorientation of the
Clowder Mission on Germany and Austria was most probably due to the fact that
Churchill had failed yet again to convince Stalin of the necessity of forming a Central
European confederation that would include Austria. Stalin re-emphasized his interest in an independent Austria.78 He thus underscored once again the Moscow Declaration as guideline for inter-Allied policymaking. But the matter of which geostrategic role
Austria would play in Europe was kept open in Teheran as well.
In December 1943, Tito authorized Wilkinson and Hesketh-Prichard to set up subversion routes into the Third Reich with the help of Slovene partisans. Tito’s approval has to be seen within the context of an agreement with respect to Yugoslav resistance the Allies had just concluded at the Teheran Conference: to provide support from then on only to Tito’s partisan army, and to withdraw support from the Serbian
Chetniks under the command of Draža Mihailović.79 In January and February 1944 following an arduous journey from Bosnia to Slovenia, Wilkinson and Hesketh-
Pritchard met several political and military leaders of the Slovene partisans and the
Communist Party of Slovenia (ZKS) in their Headquarters in Črmošnjice and the
77 The two objectives of the Clowder Mission were confirmed in February 1944: Penetration of Austria and Germany, as well as reconnoitering locations of a future SOE base in Slovenia for additional work in Central Europe. TNA, HS 6/14, Cipher Tel to Cairo, 20 February 1944. 78 See Bischof, Between Responsibility and Rehabilitation, 63–5. 79 On this subject, also see H. Williams, Parachutes, Patriots, and Partisans. The Special Operations Executive and Yugoslavia, 1941-1945 (London 2003), 187; R. Bailey, ‘Communist in SOE. Explaining James Klugmann’s Recruitment and Retention’, in N. Wylie (ed.) The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War. Special Operations Executive, 1940–1946 (London 2007), 66–89, 69.
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regional partisan Headquarters of the IX. Corps in Cerkno closer to the German border and negotiated the concrete terms of cooperation with them.80 In going about this, the two SOE officers obtained information about the rebels’ territorial and political aims, and insights into the organisation of their uprising. Furthermore, they learned that the
Slovene partisans were in contact with a resistance organisation in Austria, the Austrian
Freedom Front (ÖFF), which was in urgent need of radio equipment, arms and propaganda and was prepared to accept British officers into their ranks to act as technical advisors and as a sign of political recognition. Information about the existence of the ÖFF was one of the key factors that motivated Wilkinson to press ahead with the
Clowder Mission. Conversely, British interest spurred Yugoslavian and Slovenian partisan leaders to intensify collaboration with non-Slovene anti-Nazis in Austria, first and foremost KPÖ cadres. The conflicts that arose thereby are a subject I will return to later. Both sides’ reports testify to the will to cooperate but also bring out the distrust that had already emerged about the information provided by and intentions of the other side.81 In retrospect, the partisan leaders’ information about the ÖFF was essentially true. Incited by the Moscow Declaration, KPÖ cadres from various Austrian provinces actually had gathered in November 1943 in the heavily industrialized region around the
80 Among them were commanders Franc Rožman-Stane, Boris Kraigher, Franc Leškosek-Luka, Ales Bebler as well as the secretary of the Communist Party of Slovenia. B. Kidrič. See Wilkinson, Foreign Fields, 173. 81 TNA, HS 6/15, From Clowder for CD and ADE, 6 February 1944; Arhiv Republike Slovenje (ARS), AS 1931 er. 687 301-6/ZA (A383510), OZNA za Slovenjo, III. odsek, prd. 9, Debononje zarez. misje, 12 February 1945.
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city of Leoben in Northern Styria where there had long been a well-organised labour movement, and founded the Landeskomitee der österreichischen Freiheitsfront für
Steiermark und Kärnten to launch the struggle ‘for the establishment of a free, independent and democratic Austria’.82 The ÖFF was established by KPÖ activists who had received training in spring 1943 in a partisan battalion of the IX. Corps in the
Triglav region. Thus, its mission was already to transfer to Austria the experience resistance fighters had gained in Slovenia. The program called for the ÖFF to pursue the
Communists’ popular front concept. It defined itself as a joint organisation of
Communists, Social Democrats and Christian-Social Democrats.83 Wilkinson presumed that the account of it was more wishful thinking than reality. However, the mutual distrust initially had no impact on carrying out the Clowder Mission; the focus remained on the potential benefits both sides offered one another. Decisive for the Clowder
Mission was the fact that partisan companies were already operating in the
Karawankens and could serve as a conduit for the agents’ infiltration. Conversely, prompt delivery of the first shipments of arms and equipment to the IX. Corps in
Cerkno demonstrated to the partisan commanders that Wilkinson and Hesketh-Pritchard had outstanding contacts to British headquarters and were able to fulfill their promises.
Wilkinson agreed to regularly deliver weapons, equipment and foodstuffs to the
82 Neugebauer, Austrian Resistance, 197. 83 Manfred Mugrauer, Die Politik der KPÖ in der Provisorischen Regierung Renner (Innsbruck 2006), 24.
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Slovene partisans in return for their support for the Clowder Mission in the form of information, infrastructure, courier services and mediating contacts to anti-Nazi elements in Austria. Even after Wilkinson’s departure, relations with the local partisan group in Cerkno went well. Hesketh-Prichard described them as ‘100 %’.84
Following his reconnaissance, Wilkinson authored an impressive study of the Slovene insurgency in order to develop a deeper understanding of its meaning for future British policy in Central Europe. In addition to military considerations, Wilkinson paid particular attention to three political aspects: the fact that this guerilla warfare enjoyed strong political support within the Slovene population (as well as the insurgents’ high degree of political organisation); the national objectives of the partisan leadership (i.e. aspirations to establish a united Slovenian nation-state that would include territory that had belonged to prewar Italy and prewar Austria); and their perception of the so-called
Big Three Allied powers. Wilkinson took note of an almost blind, practically
‘pathological’ admiration for the USSR and the Red Army that was considered the spearhead of and role model for the national liberation struggle.
Wilkinson was interested above all in what Soviet power meant for the postwar era in case Soviet imperialism became virulent in Central and Western Europe. He envisioned a scenario in which Greater Slovenia—including, in the west, the Italian city of Triest
84 Imperial War Museum (IWM), Papers of Peter Wilkinson (PPW), 3/3, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard to Charles Villiers, 17 March 1944.
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and the adjacent Venezia Giulia region, as well as, in the north, the Austrian cities of
Villach and Klagenfurt—would be, in addition to Czechoslovakia, Russia’s most important gateway to the West. Nevertheless, Wilkinson recommended that the SOE and the Foreign Office refrain from communicating to the partisan leadership open opposition to the Slovenes’ territorial plans, despite the fact that the Foreign Office had by then already decided in favour of reestablishing the Republic of Austria within its
1938 borders.85 Wilkinson’s intention with respect to exporting the ‘Slovene experiment’ to Italy and ex-Austria was to exploit it to further the SOE’s interests. In
Wilkinson’s own words: ‘The Slovenians are only too willing to cooperate in this penetration, since it asks nothing of them which is in any way incompatible with their own interests, and helps to widen their sphere of influence’.86
Wilkinson’s reckoning was guided by the insight that the Soviets had hardly established a presence in Slovenia and had not been in a position up to that point to deliver material support to the partisans, and Wilkinson aimed to take advantage of this material vacuum in the summer and autumn of 1944. As far as the timing was concerned, this gambit meshed well with the British expectation that the war would end no later than 1944.
Wilkinson’s papers also contain his reminiscences about T. E. Lawrence, Britain’s
85 TNA, CAB 121/353, U 2331/32/70, The Frontiers of Austria, 18 February1944. 86 TNA FO 371/44255, R98160, Memorandum on the Revolt in Slovenia, 27 April 1944, published in: Barker, Social Revolutionaries, 83–116, 109.
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masterful agent who had promoted British interests during World War I by whipping up an Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire.
In light of these facts and circumstances, Wilkinson drew up the final plan of Mission
Clowder. First of all, he advocated dropping Clowder Mayor since the Slovenes and the
Soviets would oppose such a massive British presence. Instead, he recommended setting up small base camps in the Carnic Alps and the Karawanken Range, and concentrating operations on infiltrating agents (Clowder Minor).87 Its objective was to take advantage of help provided by Slovene partisans to establish contact with local
Austrian resistance groups in Carinthia, Styria and Vienna, and to enlist them on behalf of the British cause in Central Europe. But Wilkinson was still looking far beyond
Austria. On 7 June 1944, he wrote to his liaison officer at Clowder base in Monopoli:
‘Policy is now clear at last [...]. The position is, briefly, that we remain an independent mission advancing along the Axis Ljubljana-Berlin, always pushing on as hard as we can and exploiting whatever opportunities arise en route. This is the primary task.’88
Wilkinson’s phraseology thus indicates that he saw Clowder as a competitor in a race with the advance of the Soviets to establish a presence in Central Europe.
In contrast to Wilkinson’s utter fascination with the Slovene partisans and their organisation was his almost complete indifference to the situation in Austria. His
87 TNA, HS 6/13, Memorandum on the Clowder Plan for penetrating Austria, 20 March 1944. 88 IWM, PPW, 03/56/1, 3/2, Peter Wilkinson to Edward Renton, 7. June 1944.
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reports had little to say about the mood there. More or less authoritative information about that country was scant, and there was not even a trace of the then-available British intelligence such as ‘Opinion and Morale in Austria’, a memorandum produced by the
PWE in early 1943, which pointed out that German nationalism was far stronger in
Styria and Carinthia than in all other Austrian provinces.89 According to the estimates of the PWE, in German-Slavic border regions with their history of nationality-based conflicts, German propaganda that stirred up fear of the Red Army and pan-Slavism still fell on fertile soil. It was not until their protracted stay among the Carinthian partisans in the Karawankens during the summer of 1944 that the Clowder Mission officers gained a better understanding of the situation in Austria. Why no national will to put up resistance emerged in Austria was attributed by Charles Villiers to the fact that almost all Austrian men between the ages of 16 and 40 had been called up to serve in the
Wehrmacht. Combined with the influx of evacuees from the German cities this had diluted the national character of the country, Villiers argued. Accordingly, there were poor prospects for anti-German resistance among non-Slovenes not only in Carinthia and Styria but also in Austria as a whole.90 Thus, Villiers quite correctly recognized the
89 TNA, HS 6/3, Opinion and Morale in Austria, 25 January 1943. 90 TNA, HS 6/17, Report on a Mission to Carinthia (Korosko) May to September, 1944 by Major C. H. Villiers, (subsequently cited as Report on a Mission to Carinthia).
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key function of the Wehrmacht in integrating Austrians into the German
Volksgemeinschaft.91
From the outset, the Clowder Mission officers in the field had been arranged in a delicate political position. While they aimed at exploiting the Soviets’ absence and the
Slovenian Liberation Front’s territorial ambitions to infiltrate groups of agents via
Carinthia and Styria into Central Europe they were obliged to comply with the Foreign
Office’s proviso to make no promises to the Slovene partisan leaders with respect to the future Austrian-Slovenian border. The Clowder officers were to limit themselves to a non-binding statement ‘that they knew H.M.G. policy was to create a strong
Jugoslavia’.92 In June, Hesketh-Prichard received the following orders: ‘Stick to
Moscow Declaration that liberation Austria allied war aim but final settlement depends on extent of her own resistance STOP Since strong Jugoslavia is aim unlikely for strategic reasons Karawanken frontier will be moved north include Austrian Slovenes
[…]’.93 In early summer 1944, the territorial question and the Moscow Declaration seems not to have been discussed among the Clowder Mission officers and their
Slovene partners. The ZKS had likewise issued a directive to the Carinthian units to not bring up the matter of the postwar border.94 Actually more practical issues were at the
91 See Th. R. Grischany, Der Ostmark treue Alpensöhne. Die Integration der Österreicher in die großdeutsche Wehrmacht, 1938-45 (Göttingen 2015), 10. 92 TNA, FO 371/38839, Note on a meeting between Mr. Geoffrey Harrison, Lt. Col. Thornley and Lt. Col. Wilkinson at the Foreign Office, 9 June 1944. 93 TNA, HS 6/15, To Clowder, 12 June 1944. 94 Biber, Yugoslav and British policy, 105.
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forefront. When Hesketh-Prichard arrived in the Karawanken, he was surprised at the numerical weakness of the Carinthian partisan groups—the Western Carinthian unit consisted of only 40 poorly equipped men who survived in the woods under the most precarious conditions and constant enemy harassment.95 The Eastern Carinthian unit was somewhat stronger, but also desperately needed weapons in order to put more fighters in the field. Right from the outset, the attitude of the local partisan leadership towards the British officers was ambivalent: on one hand, they urgently needed equipment; on the other hand, the presence of the British mission meant a considerably heightened security risk.96 The relations between the Clowder Mission and the Slovene partisans can be analysed on two levels—on the operational level with the Staff of the
Carinthian Group of Detachments (ŠKGO) in the Karawanken mountains and, on the political level, with the Regional Committee of Liberation for Slovene Carinthia
(POOF) and with the Communist Party of Slovenia (ZKS), which was in charge of the conduct of partisan warfare.
On the military level, the ŠKGO operating in the Karawanken between June and
September 1944 established a form of cooperation with the Clowder officers that can generally be described as containment and stalling tactics. British officers were not permitted to move about on their own, though they were promised that their agents
95 TNA, FO 371/38839, C8260/2802/13, Notes on the Situation in the Drau valley in Southern Austria, 12 June 1944. 96 TNA, HS 6/17, Report on a Mission to Carinthia.
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would be transported across the Drau River and deeper into Austrian territory as soon as possible. Since the partisans employed a system of laissez-passer documents
(‘propusnica’) to control movements, the British officers were able to establish contact only under supervision with civilians in Carinthia and the liberated zones in Slovenia that the partisans put them in touch with. And this is also why they failed to gain access to ethnic German elements of the population while they were stationed in the
Karawankens. However, during this period, Hesketh-Pritchard organised the two
Carinthian partisan groups’ massive military buildup via 27 airdrops of weapons, ammunition and equipment, and offered military training.97 The shipments contained rifles and Sten guns, explosives, clothing and shoes, foodstuffs, inflatable boats, cigarettes and medicine. According to SOE sources, this enabled the Carinthian partisan detachments to reach 900—the largest number of fighting men they ever put in the field—and to conduct the most intense resistance warfare within the borders of the
Third Reich. British support enabled the partisans to withstand the intensified anti- partisan warfare being waged by German security forces. On April 1, 1944, Himmler
97 This figure is yielded by a count of the weekly reports filed by the Clowder Mission from June to October 1944, which are stored in fascicles HS 6/16 und HS 6/17. In his summary report, Charles Villiers stated that there had been 20 sorties during the period from mid-June to the end of August. TNA, HS 6/17, Report on a Mission to Carinthia. In early September 1944, Wilkinson estimated that 100 tons of equipment had been delivered. IWM, PPW, 03/56/2, 3/2, Peter Wilkinson to Ronald Thornley, 9 July 1944. Linasi used partisan records as the basis for his statement that there had been only 14 deliveries between June and November 1944. Whatever the exact number was, armed resistance by the Carinthian partisan units would have been impossible without the logistical and material support provided by the SOE. Barker has already come to the same conclusion; see Barker, Partisan warfare, 207.
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had set up an operations staff in Klagenfurt to ‘combat gangs’ and transferred SS-
Polizeiregiment 13 from the Soviet Union to Carinthia. At least 747 battles and other actions targeting armed German units were recorded between August 1942 and May
1945. The account by Linasi confirms that partisan warfare was at peak intensity by far between June and September 1944, and thus during the presence of the Clowder
Mission and after Nazi officials stepped up their anti-partisan efforts.98 And without the armament by Mission Clowder, the Carinthian partisans would never have been able to successfully withstand large-scale frontal combat with German troops as they did 18-24
August at the Battle of Crna. Hesketh-Prichard reported this remarkable feat via radio to the SOE base in Monopoli and, in turn, relayed Field Marshal Alexander’s praise for and appreciation of the partisans. In addition to tying up German SS, police and other units amounting to almost one infantry division99, the Carinthian partisan groups were able to offer Wehrmacht deserters, anti-fascists, and escaped concentration camp prisoners, forced labourers and POWs a comparatively safe haven and the opportunity to participate in the fight against the Nazis. The military cooperation and the logistics of the materiel shipments proceeded to the complete satisfaction of the Clowder officers.
Charles Villiers even described it as ‘close and happy cooperation’.100
98 Linasi, Die Kärntner Partisanen, 397, 418. 99 Linasi, Die Kärntner Partisanen, 416. 100 TNA, HS 6/17, Report on a Mission to Carinthia.
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On the political level, while a military cooperation with the staff of the Carinthian
Group of Detachments went quite smoothly, the Clowder Mission received no support from the POOF to enable it to penetrate into Austria. In their negotiations with POOF’s local ZKS cadres, the British officers sought to establish contact with anti-Nazi
Austrians in Carinthia and Styria as well as Austrians who were present at the partisans’ regional and national headquarters, but the POOF officials prevented Clowder Mission personnel from engaging in any actual interpersonal relations. This policy of isolation applied not only to the British officers at the partisans’ bases in the Karawankens but also to those at other regional and national headquarters.101 Opponents of the Nazis who came from Styria and Vienna to Slovenia to establish contact with British officers were kept away from them. Contrary to Radomir Luza’s account, no records have yet been found in War Office and SOE sources documenting contacts to the Britons having been arranged by Slovenian partisan leaders.102 The reason for isolating the Clowder officers was political. Compared to the situation in winter and spring 1944, the options to the
ZKS had substantially widened in the meantime. Parallel to the development of Mission
Clowder, since April 1944 the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (SKJ) in close
101 IWM, PPW, 03/56/2 3/3, Letter from Alex Ramsay to Peter Wilkinson, 29 August 1944; HS 7/146, History of ‘Clowder’ Mission. Summer 1943 – Autumn 1945, 13. 102 R. Luža, Der Widerstand in Österreich 1938-1945 (Vienna 1983), 224. Biber quotes an order from the Slovene Partisan Headquarter dated 23 June 1944 stating that the ‘Allied intelligence centres should be given only military information and not under any circumstances political informations or statements’. Biber, Yugoslav and British policy, 107–8.
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cooperation with the ZKS was working together with the Comintern103 and the KPÖ’s leadership in Moscow to develop common projects in order to transfer ‘Slovene experience’ into Austria and foment armed resistance there along the lines of the
Moscow Declaration.
To better understand the Communist infiltration projects, its strategic orientation and political implications, it is necessary to go into more detail about the relations among the KPÖ’s underground organisations in Carinthia and Styria, the KPÖ leaders in exile in Moscow, the Comintern and the ZKS. As previously noted, a reorganisation of the
KPÖ’s resistance cells in Carinthia and Styria began in 1943 under the banner of the
ÖFF. In Carinthia, the reorganisation was already shaped by the ZKS’ presence in bilingual regions, where it had set up local OF cells. In contrast to the situation in Styria and eastern Austria, the question of the precise respective territories in which the KPÖ and the ZKS would be in charge of the resistance effort arose in Carinthia. The first meeting of the KPÖ chief in Carinthia, Konrad Bucher, with the ZKS’ leading functionaries for Carinthia, Dušan Pirjevec-Ahac and Janez Kmet-Mirko, took place in late November 1943. Political responsibility for cooperation with the KPÖ in Carinthia had been entrusted to Tito’s confident Edvard Kardelj, a member of the Central
Committee of the SKJ and the ZKS. According to Yugoslavian sources, it was agreed
103 Respectively with its successor organisation at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union VKP(b)).
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that in the Slovenian-speaking area of Carinthia, the KPÖ would transfer its organisation to the ZKS. The area under ZKS control would also include the provincial capital, Klagenfurt, but no agreement was reached on the second-largest city, Villach, a predominantly German-speaking industrial center and transportation hub. Bucher refused to cede control over the organisation in Villach to the ZKS. Since this question could not be resolved on the local level, Kardelj referred the matter to the Comintern to be addressed with the KPÖ leadership in Moscow.104 For the time being, Kardelj ordered the Carinthian ZKS functionaries to stop raising issues having to do with nationality and focus on developing a joint resistance effort that was considered as the best precondition for the fulfillment of Slovenian national interests in the postwar negotiations.105
A second source of conflict was initiating the conduct of armed struggle. In the bilingual region, this initially would have meant that German-speaking Communists would be attached to Slovenian partisan units. Beyond the territory to which it laid claim, the ZKS pressed the KPÖ functionaries to also form Austrian partisan units. Both ideas were rejected by the KPÖ’s leading activists, and the Central Committee of the
104 Biber, Yugoslav and British Policy, 109; Linasi, Die Kärntner Partisanen, 372. 105 Andrej Leben and Erwin Köstler, ‘Von den primären Quellen zum publizistischen Diskurs über den bewaffneten Widerstand der Partisanen in Kärnten’, in Zeitgeschichte 34, 4 (2007), 226–42, 227.
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KPÖ in Moscow concurred that waging partisan warfare in Austria would be premature.106
The problems in Austria were discussed during negotiations with a Yugoslavian military mission on 12 April 1944 in Moscow. One important organisational decision was to transfer Franz Honner, a member of the KPÖ’s Central Committee and later
Austrian minister of the interior, and some other leading KPÖ cadres to the Slovenian partisans’ general staff in Črnomelj. Kardelj briefed Franc Leskošek-Luka, secretary of the Central Committee of the ZKS and Slovene Minister of War, in early May 1944 on these moves that centralized the resolution of political issues between the KPÖ on one hand and the ZKS and the SKJ on the other.107 Now, let us turn our attention to the two differences of opinion that emerged in the winter and spring of 1944. Regarding the armed struggle in Austria, it was initially decided in Moscow to use trained KPÖ activists, primarily Spanish Civil War veterans, and a few Soviet fighters, and to deploy them to Slovenia at an appropriate time. It can be assumed that the basic decision to form such a unit named ‘Avantgarde’ had already been made immediately after the promulgation of the Moscow Declaration.108 The KPÖ’s reluctance to initiate partisan
106 K. Prušnik-Gašper, Gemsen auf der Lawine. Der Kärntner Partisanenkampf (Klagenfurt/Celovec 1984), 220, 230. 107 Biber, Yugoslav and British policy, 110; Tone Ferenc, ‘The Austrians and Slovenia’, in Fred Parkinson (ed.), Conquering the Past. Austrian Nazism Yesterday and Today (Detroit 1989), 207–22, 222; Stephen Clissold (ed.), Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union 1939-1973. A Documentary Survey (London 1975), 30. 108 C. Fleck, Koralmpartisanen. Über abweichende Karrieren politisch motivierter Widerstandskämpfer (Vienna 1986), 25.
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warfare changed explicitly in early June 1944 following the Western Allies’ landing in
Normandy and liberation of Rome, both of which raised expectations that they would rapidly advance to Germany’s borders. At a conference in Moscow 10-14 June 1944, the KPÖ, in close consultation with the VKP(b), drew up a manifesto entitled Die
Wiedergeburt Österreichs (The Rebirth of Austria) and issued it as a declaration formulated by the ÖFF in Austria. The document maintained that in Austria ‘the time was now ripe for a general popular uprising, for a people’s war against the German oppressors’.109
The KPÖ’s position on the question of the sovereignty of resistance fighters operating in Carinthia was also resolved in July. The VKP(b) informed Kardelj on 30 June 1944, that Honner should receive all support. At the same time it was stressed that the border question should not be a subject of controversy and assured that ‘the Austrian
Communist Party is, in principle, for a union of the Slovenian regions with a future
Yugoslav state, i. e., with Slovenia’.110 Following talks with Honner in Črnomelj,
Kardelj stated in a letter to Tito dated 5 September 1944 ‘that Honner had agreed that the anti-Nazi activities of the Slovenes in Carinthia amounted to a practical plebiscite expressing their wish to be incorporated in Yugoslavia’.111 This makes it clear that the
Slovenian leaders regarded the resistance struggle by the Carinthian Slovenes as a
109 Mugrauer, Die Politik der KPÖ, 22. 110 Letter from Aleš Bebler to Franc Leskošek-Luka, 18 July 1944, quoted in Biber, Yugoslav and British policy, 110. 111 Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, 30.
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contribution to liberation from the Nazis that would be honored as such in the final settlement in accordance with the Moscow Declaration—to wit, by ceding the predominantly Slovene region of Carinthia to Slovenia. Honner and Kardelj also agreed that the partisan units in Austria would operate under the joint command of the OF and the ÖFF.112 In addition to discussing the future national territory, a matter of central importance for the ZKS, the Soviet Union’s geo-strategic interests in Austria were also treated during these talks. Honner informed Kardelj ‘that the U.S.S.R. would not give up Austria, because it will have [to] be a link between Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia’.113 Furthermore, Yugoslavia was to participate in the occupation of
Austria. However, Kardelj also openly acknowledged the weak point of the Communist plans: ‘In Austria itself there is still no serious movement’.
By ‘Austria itself’, Kardelj meant areas beyond those in which Carinthian Slovenes lived—i.e. where the KPÖ was responsible for setting up the ÖFF. Kardelj’s assessment accurately summed up the situation. In Carinthia, Nazi security forces had not only intensified their anti-partisan efforts but were also harassing non-Slovene opponents.
Gestapo raids in May and June smashed the organisations that the KPÖ and ÖFF set up in Carinthia. In addition to arresting 49 activists, Gestapo officers shot the leading KPÖ functionary, Hubert Knes. The KPÖ’s organisation had been penetrated by Gestapo
112 Poročilo Franklina A. Lindsaya o misiji na Štajerskem 1944, in Borec, 35, 2 (1983), 94–114, footnote 46 (authored by Tone Ferenc). 113 Quoted in Biber, Yugoslav and British Policy, 110.
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informants.114 A better situation still prevailed in the industrial area of Upper Styria, where KPÖ activists set up a secret civilian organisation consisting of sympathizers from across the anti-Nazi political spectrum, supporters and informants working for
National Socialist agencies, the railroad, industrial enterprises and at local Wehrmacht facilities, farmers, and women who provided food, clothing and shelter, and established a series of bases in the mountains. This civilian organisation of the ÖFF (‘organisation on the ground’) was no doubt the strongest such group in Austria, but it was by no means as deeply rooted among the populace as that of the OF in Slovenian Carinthia. In
June, a group of about 20 activists equipped with arms and explosives stolen from the
Wehrmacht wrecked railway infrastructure and attacked local Nazis. These partisan raids carried out until mid-month were the first operations outside of Carinthia, but the
Leoben-Donawitz partisan group, whose strategy was to avoid direct military confrontations due to its scant personnel, soon found itself on the defensive, and was gradually decimated through persecution by Gestapo, SS, police and other Nazi units.
Meanwhile, the Gestapo exposed the civilian network of supporters. Between July and
October, approximately 500 people were arrested, sent to concentration camps or
114 Anklage 11J 49/45. Available at: Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil 1933-1945. Online-Datenbank. De Gruyter. http://db.saur.de/DGO/basicFullCitationView.jsf?documentId=wo376 (accessed 8 January 2016); Kärntner Landesarchiv (KLA), LGK 17Vr1617/47, Beweisantrag Thomas Frohnwieser, 15 September 1947. See Linasi, Die Kärntner Partisanen, 109–12.
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executed.115 This sequence of events clearly shows that, in Upper Styria as well, there was far too little opposition to the Nazi regime among the general populace to be able to sustain locally organised, open resistance. Nevertheless, it must also be pointed out that the ÖFF in Upper Styria received no outside support either.
The Clowder Mission as well changed its strategy in August, when it had the impression that it was bogged down in the Karawankens. The ŠKGO and POOF had indeed briefed Hesketh-Prichard and Villiers about the elimination of the ÖFF groups in
Carinthia and a breakdown of communications with Upper Styria, but neither about the
ÖFF groups still operating, such as the one in Ferlach that existed until March 1945 nor the OF cells still operating in the Klagenfurt basin.116 The raids in Carinthia and Styria were the Slovenian partisan leaders’ rationale for refusing to permit Clowder Mission agents already in Slovenia to penetrate Austria.117 At the same time, the Clowder officers concluded from the fact that the Soviets’ Free Austria broadcasts included no hard news about open resistance in Austria that the ÖFF had either been crushed or, in the best-case analysis, been put on ice due to the severe repressive measures.
115 Meldung wichtiger staatspolizeilicher Ereignisse, Nr. 3, 15 September 1944. Available at: Nationalsozialismus, Holocaust, Widerstand und Exil 1933-1945. Online-Datenbank. De Gruyter. http://db.saur.de/DGO/basicFullCitationView.jsf?documentId=rk857 (accessed 9 January 2016). See W. Anzenberger, ‘Partisanen: Militärischer Widerstand an der Eisenstraße’, in W. Anzenberger, Ch. Ehetreiber, H. Halbrainer (eds) Die Eisenstraße 1938-1945. NS-Terror–Widerstand–Neues Erinnern (Graz 2013), 123–70, 141–7; Neugebauer, The Austrian Resistance, 197–8. 116 Linasi, Die Kärntner Partisanen, 114–5. 117 TNA, HS 6/7, Report on a Mission to Carinthia, Appendix ‚A’, Excerpts from a letter from Komisar Kraigher of Slovene G.H.Q., 7 August 1944.
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Nevertheless, they believed there was a chance to ‘artificially and externally’ reactivate the ÖFF and form a core of resistance that could be nurtured with outside support. To this end, Hesketh-Prichard pressed the ŠKGO to permit him and a partisan unit to cross the Drau and advance to the Saualpe, a mountain range on the Carinthia-Styria border.
There, according to Hesketh-Prichard’s plan, he would be reinforced by a group of SOE paratroopers consisting of British and Austrian officers. This unit would then detach from the Slovenian partisans and independently recruit Austrians for the resistance struggle.118 Hesketh-Prichard’s proposal had been anticipated by the Slovene partisan leaders as well as, no doubt, members of a Soviet mission that had in the meantime joined the regional operations staff.119 While the SOE continued to supply the partisans in the Karawankens with armaments—also meant to equip the upcoming Saualpe incursion—the ZKS and KPÖ were carrying out two projects. One was to prepare the
Avantgarde group of partisans that had arrived from the Soviet Union for their advance into Austria. The second project was the formation of Austrian battalions that were to fight on the side of the Yugoslavian Army and, under the banner of the ÖFF and as called for in the Moscow Declaration, take part in Austria’s liberation. To this end, camps for men who escaped from Austria or deserted from the Wehrmacht were set up
118 TNA HS 6/17, Weekly Sitrep, 25 October 1944. 119 ARS, AS 1931 ev. 401, Izveštaj o predmetu kap. Ulčar Jožeta, 26 August 1947; TNA, WO 202/212, TG No. 76, from Gummit, 28 September 1944.
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in Crnomelj and Ljubno.120 The area of deployment of both KPÖ operations was not
Carinthia but rather the adjacent region of southern Styria. In Carinthia, the lion’s share of the contribution called for by the Moscow Declaration was evidently to be left up to the Slovene partisan units. While the Clowder Mission was kept pent up in the
Karawankens, the Slovene partisans fully assisted the Avantgarde partisan group’s advance into Carinthia by mid-September and further on to the Koralpe in Southern
Styria. The Clowder Mission people learned nothing of either undertaking.121
Nevertheless, the Clowder Mission still had an important function for the Slovene partisan leaders. Despite the deterioration of the relationship between Tito and the
Western Allies beginning in September 1944,122 the Clowder Mission was still delivering weapons to the Slovene partisans. In negotiations with Leškosek-Luka in mid-September 1944, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard pledged to continue delivering arms in return for authorization to advance into Austria with a partisan battalion. But while
Hesketh-Prichard and Wilkinson were reporting the results of the negotiations as a successful breakthrough (‘a politico-military triumph’123), Leškosek-Luka was issuing
120 W. I. Holzer, ‘Die österreichischen Bataillone in Jugoslawien 1944–1945. Zur Widerstandsstrategie der österreichischen kommunistischen Emigration’, in Zeitgeschichte, 5, 1–2 (1977), 39–76, 47. 121 There is no information whatsoever on this subject in the Mission Clowder reports. In contradistinction to what he suggested in his memoirs, Wilkinson did not learn of the existence of the Avantgarde group until the late 1970s. See IWM, PWP, 03/56/2, 3/6/9, Peter Wilkinson, The British, the Yugoslavs, and Austria – some notes on Dr. Biber’s paper; Wilkinson, Foreign Fields, 199. 122 See Barker, Social Revolutionaries, 36; D. Biber, ‘The Yugoslav Partisans and the British in 1944’, in Deakin et al., British Political and Military Strategy, 111–30, 122. 123 IWM, PPW, 03/56/2 3/2, Peter Wilkinson to Edward Renton, 4 October 1944.
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orders to his partisan unit’s commander to execute Hesketh-Prichard once they got into
Austria.124
The historical accounts of the Clowder Mission and the British and American missions in Slovenia have contained much speculation about the reasons Mission Clowder went awry and the disappearance of Hesketh-Prichard.125 In any case, his radio transmissions from Saualpe to the SOE base give no indications that he intended to set up a resistance group ‘in order to have available a force which might counter Tito’s push into
Carinthia’, as British historian Heather Williams has maintained as a reason for his murder.126 Hesketh-Prichards general aim was to push deeper into Austria. He intended to set up a base as a collection point for other SOE agents who would then fan out towards Vienna, Graz and Tyrol ‘to ferment support and exploit all Austrian resistance’,127 but, due to continually inclement flying weather in October and
November, the RAF was unable to parachute in reinforcements for Hesketh-Prichard.
One of ideas he later considered was linking up with the ÖFF, fortifying its ranks and forming an anti-communist core within them, but this had, in the meantime, been strictly rejected by both the Foreign Office and the SOE’s Austrian Section, who had no intention of either strengthening a communist lead organization such as the ÖFF or
124 ARS, AS 1931 ev. 401, Izveštaj o predmetu kap. Ulčar Jožeta, 26 August 1947. 125 On this subject see Pirker, Partisanen und Agenten, 32–3. 126 Williams, Parachutes, 237. 127 TNA, HS 6/14, From Clowder to Torch, TG No. 272, 21 October 1944.
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risking a conflict between rival factions within the resistance movement.128 The PWE too wanted no part of a call to support the ÖFF.129
The turning point was finally brought about by the Allied Forces Headquarters’
(AFHQ) decision to discontinue the effort to foment resistance in Austria. ‘Operational value Austrian resistance before the end of war likely to be insignificant’, was the wording of Wilkinson’s radio transmission to Hesketh-Prichard. Dispatching additional
SOE agents to Hesketh-Prichard was ordered to be removed from the SOE’s operational to-do list.130 In light of the dramatically deteriorating relations between the Western
Allies and Tito, Wilkinson concurred with Hesketh-Prichard’s decision to terminate his mission.131 It is unclear whether Hesketh-Prichard advised his partisan battalions of this decision to withdraw. A few days later during a joint reconnaissance tour with the commander of his battalion, he was shot. It is important to note that his murder was not due to conflicts with his battalion. Contrary to what is maintained in popular accounts,132 his radio transmissions provide no evidence of conflicts about the treatment of the local populace, liquidations, forcible requisitioning or forced recruitment raids.
Hesketh-Prichard had been identified by the leadership of the ZKS already before as an
128 TNA, FO 898/216, Minutes of Geoffrey Harrison, 16 December 1944. 129 Its position paper stated: ‘(…) we should do nothing to urge Austrians to join the OFF’. TNA, FO 898/216, S. D. Stirk to Mr. Wilson, Support in BBC Austrian braodcasts for the ‘Austrian Freedom Front’, 14 December 1944. 130 TNA, WO 204/1954, Note by Clowder Mission on Special Operations in Austria for the second half of November and the first half of December 1944. 131 TNA, HS 6/14, From Torch to Clowder, TG No. 250, 28 November 1944. 132 See I. Pust, Titostern über Kärnten 1942-1945. Totgeschwiegene Tragödien (Klagenfurt 1984), 79.
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‘objective opponent’ (Hannah Arendt) who had to be liquidated. The other losers were the foot soldiers in Hesketh-Prichard’s partisan force on Saualpe. Cut off from any possibility of retreat, in largely hostile territory, undernourished and low on ammunition, during a bitter-cold winter and constantly harried by the SS and the police, very few of the unit’s approximately 80 original members survived the war.
Once Hesketh-Prichard had disappeared without a trace and in light of the Slovene partisan leaders’ continued delaying tactics, the remaining officers attached to the
Clowder Mission were withdrawn from Slovenia in January 1945. In the final report written by Frank Pickering, the Clowder Mission officer who served the longest tour of duty in Slovenia, the author came to a finding that makes Wilkinson’s assumptions from
April-May 1944 seem like imperial hubris: ‘It is not the policy of the ZKS to allow the
British or Americans to use their lines for the purpose of infiltrating Austrians over whom they, the Slovene Communists, have no control. Neither is it the policy of the
Slovenes (whether Communist or not) to permit British or American officers to build their own organisation from Slovene soil into a country in which Slovenia is vitally interested’.133 Pickering emphasized the Slovene partisan leaders’ demand to maintain total supremacy in the partisan struggle, a characteristic that Wilkinson, from his imperial perspective, had completely underestimated.
133 TNA, WO 204/1954, A mission to the Untersteiermark (Stajersko) August 1944–January 1945 by Major Frank Pickering.
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What political insights did Mission Clowder’s experience in Slovenia yield for the planning of the postwar occupation of Austria? According to the Clowder Mission staff’s report delivered to the Foreign Office in late autumn 1944, the extent of the support for the Slovene partisans among the civilian population in Carinthia by no means justified revising Austria’s prewar borders.134 SOE was thus very clearly thwarting the opposing line of argumentation put forth by the Slovene partisan leaders.
A second insight was that there was no clearly evident will among Austrians to put up anti-Nazi resistance. The SOE’s original assumption of being able to drum up a national will to resist in Austria had proved erroneous.135 As to occupation policy in Carinthia, the SOE proposed a zero-tolerance approach to any form of separatist political activities on the part of the Slovene liberation movement in this ethnically mixed region in order to foster Austrian national identity. At the same time, the SOE officers essentially pursued a policy of leniency towards German-speaking Austrians that the Foreign
Office had been developing since 1943. Whenever ethnic conflicts occurred, solutions were to be found that were ‘designed to satisfy Austrians without giving Tito an excuse for treating Southern Austria as a Sudetenland’.136 Robert Knight used the term
134 TNA, WO 204/1954, Memorandum on the Slovene Minorities in Southern Austria and North East Italy, H.Q. S.O.(M)., 27 November 1944. 135 By mid-January 1945, the Clowder Mission draw a rather fatalistic conclusion: ‘We do not consider that the Allies will be able to make any Declaration sufficiently attractive to the Austrians to persuade them to embark on a policy of open resistance, or to help us to any significant extent’. TNA, HS 6/17, Memorandum by H.Q. Clowder Mission on Future of Special Operations in Austria, 16 January 1945. 136 TNA HS 6/17, Possible Examples of Role of Clowder Field Teams, 16 January 1945.
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‘Munich prism’ to characterize the British approach that had been formulated by Peter
Wilkinson, who was serving as political adviser to the British occupation authority in
Austria.137 From this perspective, even a policy of neutrality towards the OF’s Slovene nationalist program could only be counterproductive for Britain’s intended strategy to propagate a new Austrian identity as a sort of refuge following Germany’s defeat in battle. The upshot was the British occupation authorities’ containment of separatist agitation by the OF, a concerted response that in retrospect seems quite excessive in numerous respects. At this point, British policymakers were taking the OF’s national objectives very seriously—the lessons had been learned from the Clowder Mission. And as early as 1946, the British were already displaying a notable lack of zeal and consistency in carrying out denazification among the German-speaking populace and in sustainably implementing minority rights for the ethnic Slovenes living in Austria.138
Both were deprioritized in favour of integrating former Nazis into postwar Austrian society.139 British occupation officers as well began to play down the impact of partisan
137 Knight, Life after SOE, 76–7. 138 See R. Knight, ‘Denazification and Integration in the Austrian Province of Carinthia’, The Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), 572–612; and R. Knight, ‘Schule zwischen Zwang und Verantwortung: Britische Besatzung, Kärntner Politik und die slowenische Minderheit, 1945–1959’, in A. Ableitinger et al. (eds) Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung, 1945-1955, (Wien 1999), 531–58. 139 By way of comparison, in the US occupation zone the most determined advocates of the removal of former Nazi Party functionaries from positions of economic and political power were ambitious OSS officers, but they often failed to get their way when facing opposition from the pragmatists among U.S. occupation authorities and local Austrian politicians. Following a brief phase of internment, the American occupation element as well rolled back its policy to one of non-interference beginning in early 1946. See O. Rathkolb (ed.) Gesellschaft und Politik am Beginn der Zweiten Republik. Vertrauliche Berichte der US-Militäradministration aus Österreich 1945 in englischer Originalfassung (Vienna 1985), 16, 215, 245, 262; Ch. Stifter, Zwischen geistiger Erneuerung und Restauration. US-amerikanische Planungen zur
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operations, and in return mention of British support promptly vanished into thin air in the historical accounts of former partisans.140
But what was actually accomplished by the Clowder Mission’s Communist competitors, the projects that enjoyed the full support of the ZKS? In autumn 1944, the Avantgarde partisan group under the aegis of a Slovenian partisan battalion established a base in
Koralm in Styria and was involved in acts of sabotage and diversionary maneuvers designed to support the Red Army’s advance into that region. But it was not until April
1945 that it was capable of operating as an independent unit under the banner of the
ÖFF. In any case, in April 1945, it consisted of about 500 men, mostly Wehrmacht deserters and local anti-Nazis. However, the ÖFF was disbanded as soon as the Red
Army liberated Styria.141 The accomplishments of the Austrian battalions were similarly ambivalent. Although some of the units saw action against German forces in Slovenia, none of the five set foot on Austrian territory prior to the war’s end. Instead of fighting their way back home, on 21 April, the top echelon was flown into Vienna, which had been liberated by the Red Army, where, on 27 April, they participated in the formation of a provisional government under Social Democrat Karl Renner. Honner was named
Entnazifizierung und demokratischen Neuorientierung österreichischer Wissenschaft 1941-1955 (Vienna 2014), 660. 140 See a 1948 series of articles on the partisan struggle in the weekly paper Slovenski vestnik published by the OF; Josip Ulčar, ‘Želeli smo ostati z našimi padlimi‘, in Koroška v borbi. Spomini na osvobodilno borbo v slovenski Koroški (Celovec 1951), 185–90; Prušnik-Gašper, Gemsen, 227; Leben and Köstler, Von den primären Quellen, 233. 141 Fleck, Koralmpartisanen, 153
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minister of the interior, and members of his battalions were assigned to his police forces.142
The Soviets’ unilateral course in installing a provisional government under Renner, who had welcomed the Anschluss and took no part in the resistance movement, was an ironic reverberation of the clash among the various subversive policies formulated in 1944, and not only with respect to Renner personally. Quickly setting up a government seemed necessary to Stalin since he was under the impression that the Western powers planned a government under their domination and with the help of the bourgeois resistance movement O5 which had emerged in spring 1945.143 But Stalin’s projection was erroneous; the Western powers were totally prepared to comply with what they had previously agreed to: the formation of an Allied military government. Soviet realpolitik in April and May 1945 was an affront not only to the Western powers; it also turned the
KPÖ leaders’ political program into a stack of wastepaper.144 Promptly disbanding the partisan units and resistance groups was not unique to Austria; it was consistent with the
Soviet Union’s general policy in its sphere of influence.145 The Western Allies did likewise. As in other Western European countries, they carried out only a few tightly
142 Holzer, Die österreichischen Bataillone, 48–9; Neugebauer, Der österreichische Widerstand, 201. 143 See St. Karner and P. Ruggenthaler, Unter sowjetischer Kontrolle, 107. 144 O. Rathkolb, ‘Sonderfall Österreich? Ein peripherer Kleinstaat in der sowjetischen Nachkriegsstrategie 1945–1947’, in St. Creuzberger and M. Görtemaker (eds) Gleichschaltung unter Stalin? Die Entwicklung der Parteien im östlichen Europa 1944–1949 (Paderborn 2002) 353–73, 367; Mugrauer, Die Politik der KPÖ, 34–5. 145 See Mazower, Hitlers Imperium, 471
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circumscribed infiltration projects in Austria in 1945,146 and they instituted no measures to get resistance groups substantially involved in the liberation or to take them into account in their political planning.147 Like the Soviet Union, the Western Allies and their intelligence agencies were more interested in reinstituting the parties that had dominated the prewar political landscape and subordinating them to Allied military administrations than they were in empowering protagonists who had recently emerged in conjunction with the resistance struggle.148
In conclusion, it can thus be asserted that, in the wake of the disappointments of 1944, the contribution clause was indeed the passage of the Moscow Declaration to which the
Allies no longer ascribed much significance—already in winter 1944/45 and even less so in the postwar years. For the essential task at hand—social and political integration of a formerly failed and now reinstituted state—the victim clause was the key to success. No document manifests this more clearly than the Austrian Declaration of
Independence that, with Renner as its primary architect, was formulated totally in the spirit of the victim hypothesis and with the broadest possible application to society at large, whereas the shared responsibility clause was mentioned only as a sort of compulsory exercise, and the contribution clause was greatly relativized and played
146 See Pirker, Subversion, 413–50. 147 TNA, WO 204/2812, AFHQ Mediterranean Joint Planning Staff, Resistance Movements in Austria, 18 April 1945. See Mazower, Hitlers Imperium, 463. 148 Mazower, Hitlers Imperium, 471. On Austria see Pirker, Subversion, 428; Neugebauer, The Austrian Resistance, 258.
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down. Nevertheless, I consider it a misleading oversimplification to refer to this as a fundamentally improper ‘instrumentalization’ or ‘unintended consequence’ of the
Allies’ wartime policy.149 Great Britain in particular made in its occupation policy every effort to support Austrian politicians’ and the Austrian society’s efforts to adapt the victim hypothesis as conducive to the formation of an Austrian identity.150 Relativizing both the resistance that Austrians had put up and their shared responsibility for the
Third Reich’s deeds while simultaneously expanding the ascription of victimhood became visible with unmistakable clarity especially in the aftermath of the Clowder
Mission and its consequences for British postwar policymaking in Carinthia.
In the light of covert interallied rivalry following the Moscow declaration on Austria, the drama played out in the final stage of the Clowder Mission at the Saualpe can be regarded neither as a heroic struggle, as is the case in post-1945 partisan historiography, nor as an ‘inter-Allied tragedy’ as Anglo-American historians such as Thomas M.
Barker and William Deakin have done. Instead, it should be interpreted in the light of the geopolitics of resistance. The murder of Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard was committed at a pivotal and highly sensitive location, the site of the first opportunity to directly penetrate the Third Reich, an intersection at which Western and Soviet aims to
149 See Bischof, Instrumentalisierung; David Art, The politics of the Nazi past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge 2006), 104. 150 See J. Feichtinger, ‘Innen- und Außenansichten der britischen Besatzungsmacht über Österreich’ in U. Prutsch and M. Lechner (eds.) Das ist Österreich. Innenansichten und Außenansichten (Vienna 1997), 149–204, 189.
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influence postwar developments collided. It was a political murder in the context of covert Allied parallel operations and clandestine inter-Allied hostilities that were a prelude to the Cold War. Both communist projects were carried out within the before mentioned larger geopolitical framework. Even though these plans were never put into practice,151 the future political configuration of Austria and particularly how much influence each of the respective Allies would have was still very much an open question in spring and summer of 1944. What ensued on the Third Reich’s southeastern border was by no means a concerted inter-Allied effort to strengthen resistance in Austria the
Allies had called for in the Moscow Declaration but rather a competition characterized by covert geopolitical rivalry to achieve hegemony in an anticipated Austrian resistance movement as well as to establish a presence in Central Europe before Nazi Germany collapsed.
The favouritism shown to Communist projects was indicative of a power shift in the relationship between the Clowder Mission team and the Slovene partisan leaders—that is to say, between imperial tactical maneuvering and local claims to sovereignty. In contrast to Great Britain, the Soviet Union and its junior partner, the KPÖ, offered the
Slovene partisan leaders and the ZKS the prospect of support for their territorial ambitions in Austria when, according to the wording of the Moscow Declaration, in the final settlement account is taken of Austria’s own contribution to its liberation from
151 See Rathkolb, Sonderfall Österreich, 355.
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National Socialism. The contribution clause is often scrutinized solely from an Austrian national perspective. From the point of view of the Slovene partisan leaders and the
KPS, though, the contribution clause offered at least a chance that the military resistance put up by the Carinthian Slovenes–who had, after all, been Austrian citizens until the Anschluss–might contribute to the realization of their territorial aims. The problem of Wilkinson’s plans was not attributable to having miscalculated the importance of territorial and ethnic conflicts in Central Europe. In fact, his assessment of the political and territorial plans of the Slovene partisan leaders in spring 1944 was spot-on, but it seemed to him that they could be exploited over the short term to advance
British interests. What he miscalculated was the tripartite power relationship among imperial Great Britain, the local Slovene rebels, and the Soviet Union, which successively deteriorated from the Clowder Mission’s perspective as the Red Army’s advance into Central Europe accelerated over the course of 1944. Although the
Carinthian Slovene partisans did indeed emerge victorious from World War II, they were, in stark contrast to the overwhelming majority of German-speaking Austrians, among the losers of the peace. Neither did the OF achieve their aim of integrating
Carinthian territory into the new Slovenian nation-state nor did their resistance struggle pay off as legitimation that could yield political capital for the Slovene minority in the new Austrian nation-state. Even the Soviet Union did not act as an effective advocate of
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their interests after 1945152, to say nothing of the KPÖ, who received a mere 5.4% of the vote in the first election held in November 1945.
William Mackenzie’s assessment cited at the outset that the Clowder Mission remained
‘without practical result’ falls short of the mark too. The results of the Clowder Mission were paradoxical. Assessed in terms of whether it achieved its original objective of organizing resistance by Austrian patriots, the Clowder Mission was indeed a failure.
The main reason for this was surely the fact that, among the German-speaking population, there was no strong popular opposition–to say nothing of open resistance–to the Nazi regime, and the Mission was therefore totally reliant upon support from the
Slovene partisans. But because the team spent such a long time in the Karawankens as a result of the Slovene partisan leaders’ stalling tactics, it was ultimately the only Allied paramilitary mission that, thanks to systematic weapons shipments to the Carinthian partisans, succeeded in fomenting armed resistance within the Third Reich. They undoubtedly made the largest contribution to the struggle against the National Socialist regime within the so-called Ostmark and the Third Reich as a whole. This is their historic achievement, one that to this day is still often overlooked by scholars studying resistance, especially when the historiography itself has been arrested in national paradigms.
152 See Stourzh, Um Einheit und Freiheit, 84.
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In the rest of Austria, the SOE had only isolated successes to its credit during the war.
Its hope for Austrian patriotic resistance went largely unfulfilled. Other elements of the
SOE’s policy towards Austria proved to be more in touch with reality: the conception of
Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany; the policy of separatism from Germany and the reestablishment of Austria as an independent state; advocating a postwar coalition of
Social Democrats and Catholic Conservatives; and the anti-communist ideology and pro-Western orientation of postwar political policymaking. The British occupation power’s conflict with the Slovene partisans in postwar Carinthia has to be seen in the context of this conception of Austria. A border revision was ruled out from the start as weakening Austrian national identity. This could be called an inter-Allied tragedy— those who were ready and willing to put up anti-Nazi resistance according to the
Moscow Declaration were precisely the ones who were suppressed by the British postwar occupation authorities on account of their divergent political aims, and not the least important reason for this was in order to implement policies that would foster integration into a new Austria of elements that had considered themselves as Germans up to then.
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